During the Chinese New Year, I visited a classmate who runs a large supermarket with over 30 employees. They've been losing money since the start of the pandemic, currently losing around 6 million yuan. They're still in a loss-making state, constantly overdue on wages, borrowing money everywhere to pay employees and cover bank interest.

I told Teacher Boya that I also hope he does well, but given the current situation, it's quite difficult to turn things around.

There are three reasons:
1. Having debt with profits is manageable; but debt plus losses is a double blow. The more you persist, the deeper you sink.
2. To save a heavy asset industry, you need even larger assets—like a wealthy person holding 30 to 50 million yuan in cash, with both money and high awareness. They might step in to help, but the chances of encountering such a person are extremely low.
3. Even if such wealthy and knowledgeable people appear, reshaping the original owner’s (my classmate’s) mindset is extremely difficult.

Money is a discount of a person’s cognition. I now believe that the biggest risk in entrepreneurship isn’t a lack of money, but insufficient cognition that leads to borrowing huge resources and putting everything on the line.